Wednesday January 27th, Join the Sun Startup Essentials Webinar on  Security for Web Applications.

A key success factor for Web startups is to protect their applications and data from different security threats. Join this webinar to learn about security challenges and about key solutions such as encryption, authentication, certificates, secure and fault-tolerant storage, chrooted environments. The Sun Startup Essentials experts will also cover how to implement these solutions at minimal cost by using standard and open components such as Apache, MySQL, ZFS and more.

Registration limited to members of the Sun Startup Essentials program.

Your company is less than 6 year and  150 employee: Join Sun Startup Essentials >>

Wednesday January 27th, Join the Sun Startup Essentials Webinar on  Security for Web Applications.

A key success factor for Web startups is to protect their applications and data from different security threats. Join this webinar to learn about security challenges and about key solutions such as encryption, authentication, certificates, secure and fault-tolerant storage, chrooted environments. The Sun Startup Essentials experts will also cover how to implement these solutions at minimal cost by using standard and open components such as Apache, MySQL, ZFS and more.

Registration limited to members of the Sun Startup Essentials program.

Your company is less than 6 year and  150 employee: Join Sun Startup Essentials >>

Last week, my colleagues Giuseppe, Kai and myself attended the SAPO Codebits event in Lisbon, Portugal. Codebits is an annual, invite-only hacking event, which went on for three days. The venue they chose this year was the "Cordoaria", a former rope factory located in the Belém district, close to the 25 de Abril Bridge (which is an impressive sight!). I have been told that the Cordoaria is the longest building in Portugal and I have no doubts about that! The building is so long that the crew used bicycles to get from one end to the other. I've taken a number of …

In my last post, I mentioned the factors that affect web performance. Now that we know what we need to measure, we come to the harder problem of figuring out how to measure each of them. There are different methods depending on how much control you have over the system and the environment it runs in. Additionally, measuring performance in a test setup may not show you what real users experience, however it does give you a good baseline to compare subsequent tests against.
Web, application and database serversBack end servers are the easiest to measure because we generally have full control over the system and the environment it runs in. The set up is also largely the same in a test and production environment, and by replaying HTTP logs, it's possible to simulate real user interactions with the server.

Some of the tools one can use to …

So you're a small startup company, ready to go live with your product, which you intend to distribute under an Open Source License. Congratulations, you made a wise decision! Your developers have been hacking away frantically, getting the code in good shape for the initial launch. Now it's time to look into what else needs to be built and setup, so you're ready to welcome the first members of your new community and to ensure they are coming back!

Keep the following saying in mind, which especially holds true in the Open Source world: "You never get a second chance to make a first impression!". While the most important thing is of course to have a compelling and useful product, this blog post is an attempt to highlight some other aspects about community building and providing the adequate infrastructure. This insight is based on my own experiences and my …

If you want to play with Amazon cloud computing stuff, I think using AWS Management Console web interface is the best, easiest, and most intuitive approach, based on my experience so far.

My usage with Amazon Web Services has been only with EC2 up to this point. Prior to AWS Management Console, I had to set up Java, EC2 API tools, various path and environmental variables, certificates, keys, etc., etc.. It is a fairly convoluted process.

AWS Management Console is much easier, except for downloading PuTTY and PuTTYgen on Windows and tsclient on Linux, and a private key pair, everything else is handled inside the browser. Here are a few things I learned:

• Once you are in, create a Key Pair. The web interface will prompt you to save it. Do so, because you will need it to start instances and, depending on what type of instances …

The following links load a flash file that will report what version is installed for Adobe Flash and Adobe Shockwave.

Source: Version test for Adobe Flash Player

Source: Test Adobe Shockwave & Flash Players

Goal: Build a PHP 5.3 package, that I can install and upgrade on new ubuntu slices as needed, without having to compile on each box.

This is an amalgamation of different blog posts that did certain things really well, but not everything I wanted. The post I refer to specifically Installing PHP 5.3 on Ubuntu by Brandon Savage .

Prep your system

Setup your development server to be able to compile things. By default, most installations will not come with compilers installed.

apt-get install checkinstall

Say yes, and let it follow the dependencies as needed.

Get the development headers for some of the extensions you’ll be compiling in.

apt-get install postgresql-8.3 postgresql-client-8.3 postgresql-client-common postgresql-common postgresql-server-dev-8.3
aptitude install mysql-client …

Notes on using Symfony with multiple databases.

I’m building a new application in symfony, and I need to use some data from an existing application written by another developer.

I can’t just extend the existing application for reasons we don’t need to get into, but I do need to interface with the data, since the existing
app doesn’t really have a nice way to handle a SOA, or share data easily, my next best option is to talk to the original app’s db.

Things you need to think about.

1. No Hacks This is not a hack, symfony/propel support this out of the box, the documentation mentions it briefly but it’s definitely possible.
2. Permissions Should you share the same username/password? or different? In my case, I wanted to make sure symfony couldn’t write to the existing app, so I created a user with SELECT privileges only. (This will affect your ability …

Reggie Burnett, the lead behind MySQL Connector/NET, will be presenting a MySQL webinar, "For ISVs: ADO.NET Entity Framework for MySQL", tomorrow at 10 Pacific Time!

Among other topics, Reggie will discuss how to

• Develop your application against SQL Server and then switch it to MySQL with zero code changes

• Optimize your database schema without requiring any code changes in your application

• Use LinQ syntax for type safety in your applications

(Interest in using MySQL on Windows is growing. The 2008 MySQL OEM Annual Survey, which closed in March 2009, shows that some 73% of MySQL OEM customers develop …